iWorld
Jio overtakes Hathway wired broadband subscriber base in Jun-20
BENGALURU: Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio) has been the largest broadband internet services provider in the country – a major portion of its subscriber base is wireless internet – through the mobile phone. However, the player is also making strides in terms of customer acquisition for its wireline broadband internet services. Per Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) data for the month ended 30 June 2020 (Jun-20), Jio climbed up one spot to fourth place in terms of wireline broadband internet subscribers, pushing down its sister company Hathway Cable & Datacom (Hathway) to fifth rank. Overall, wired broadband internet subscriber base grew 2.29 percent month-on-month (m-o-m) to 1.982 crore (198.2 lakh, 19.82 million) in Jun-20 from 1.938 crore (193.8 lakh, 19.38 crore) in May-19. Jio’s wireline subscriber base grew 9.3 percent m-o-m in Jun-19 to 0.106 crore (10.6 lakh, 1.06 million) from 0.097 crore (9.7 lakh, 0.97 million) in May-20.
The public sector Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) had the largest wireline internet subscriber base of 0.79 crore (79 lakh, 7.9 million) in Jun-19 as compared to 0.793 crore (79.3 lakh, 7.93 million) in the previous month. Bharati Airtel (Airtel) was ranked second in terms of wireline broadband subscriber base. The telecom major closed June 2020 with 0.247 crore (24.7 lakh, 2.47 million) subscribers, up by around 60,000 as compared to the 0.241 crore (24.1 lakh, 2.41 million) wireline broadband subscribers in May-20.
At third place was Atria Convergence Technologies (ACT) with 0.168 crore (16.8 lakh, 1.68 million). Subscribers as compared to 0.164 crore (16.4 lakh, 1.64 million).As mentioned above, Jio was ranked fourth followed by Hathway at fifth rank. Hathway subscriber base grew by 70,000 to 0.097 crore (9.7 lakh, 0.97 million) in Jun-20 from 0.09 crore (9 lakh, 0.9 million) in May-20. Please refer to the figure below:
All Broadband Internet Subscribers
Subscriber base across All Broadband Internet platforms grew 2.11 percent in Jun-20 to 69.823 crore (6,982.3 lakh, 698.23 million) from 68.377 crore (6,837.7 lakh, 683.77 million) at the end of the previous week. Subscriber base growth was led by Mobile devices users to 67.779 crore (6,777.9 lakh, 677.79 million) at the end of Jun-20 from 66.378 crore (6,637.8 lakh, 663.78 million) in May-30. Fixed wireless subscribers (Wi-I, Wi-Max, Point-to-Point Radio and VSAT) grew by 2.23 percent to 0.063 crore (6.3 lakh, 0.63 million) in Jun-20 from 0.061 crore (6.1 lakh, 0.61 million) above. Data for wireline subscribers have been indicated above.
Please refer to the figure below:
The top five service providers constituted 98.93 percent market share of the total broadband subscribers at the end of June-20. These service providers wereJio with 39.831 crore (3,9831 lakh, 398.31 million), Airtel 15.13 crore (1,513 lakh, 151.30 million), Vodafone Idea with 11.645 crore (1,164.5 lakh, 116.45 million), BSNL 2.3 crore (230 lakh, 23 million) and ACT with 0.168 crore (16.8 lakh, 1.68 million).
As on 30th June, 2020, the top five Wireless Broadband Service providers were Jio with 38.725 crore (3,972.5 lakh, 397.25 million), Bharti Airtel with 14.884 crore (1,488.4 lakh, 148.84 million), Vodafone Idea with 11.644 crore (1,164.4 lakh, 116.44 million), BSNL with 1.51 crore (151 lakh, 15.10 million) and MTNL with 0.016 crore (1.6 lakh, 0.16 million).
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
